


the far cities are beautiful and bright

by renquise



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:51:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were so close to figuring it out, to making their own world, somewhere human-sized and troll-sized and all theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the far cities are beautiful and bright

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a total sizekink pwp for the kink meme (with the trolls larger than the kids) that turned into, er, something with a lot of feeeeelings.

John remembers meeting the trolls for the first time. First, there was an unwilling twist of space, a single moment where he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even tell if his lungs existed, let alone fill them, and Jade dumped them into the Veil, exhausted and roughed-up, but, hey, alive. He staggered a bit on the landing, but Rose was at his side, steady on her feet even if the tracings of her veins were still kinda grey.

Even as he caught himself on Rose’s shoulder, he ran into someone’s chest and bounced off, probably unlocking an in-game achievement for the slickest entrance in paradox space.

“Fuck me, we created a race of squishy inept midgets. Wow, I had never comprehended the true extent of my utter soul-crushing failure until now.”

Before meeting Karkat, John had mostly pictured him as a tiny ball of anger, a super-dense white dwarf of rage typing away in the middle of space. But it turned out that wow, Karkat wasn’t small at all. He even had to bend his head back to look Karkat in the eye. Sure, he was still on the shorter side of the trolls—Kanaya had already been well taller than all of them when they had first met, and now, Kanaya towers over Rose like some kind of crazy-statuesque vampire amazon lady—but John’s head came up no higher than Karkat’s chest.

And somehow, being insulted by a giant grey alien made things a little more okay.

“A pocket Dave!” said Terezi, scooping up Dave in one fell swoop. She made Dave look tiny, and sure, Dave was short, but not that short.

“Polly Pocket, Texas edition, it's me. The knockoff version, comes with unbelievably shitty accessories, the ponytail snapped off, and a couple of miscolours. And that oyster shell packaging that you have to hack open with whatever you can find. Happy birthday, I got you some plastic-inflicted maiming,” Dave said, hanging resignedly in Terezi's arms.

“A limited-edition pocket Dave,” Terezi said and grinned.

John remembers, vividly, sticking his hand for a manly friendleader handshake. His dad had always taught him that a good firm handshake was really important for first impressions. Okay, maybe it was a little late for first impressions, given that Karkat then greeted him with “Holy bulgemunching fuck, what took you so long, you painfully bankrupt brain trust,” but it was the gesture that mattered! Karkat was apparently familiar with this particular human custom, and though he scowled down at John, he held out his hand.

There were so many other weird things about the trolls—their horns, their yellow eyes, their grey skin—that their size should have been peanuts in comparison. But they were just really big! Karkat’s hand completely enveloped his own, as large as his dad’s, if not larger. John thought he managed to give Karkat a pretty manly human handshake, though. He couldn’t resist grasping Karkat’s hand afterwards, straightening out his fingers and spreading his own hand against it. The tips of his fingers barely passed the crease of Karkat’s second knuckles. He had enough time to wonder at the strange bones and knobby joints shifting under his fingers before Karkat yanked his hand away, muttering something about stupid palm-mashing alien greeting rituals.

John later saw Karkat hunched over his computer, talking to his future self or one of their past selves or something. It wasn’t over yet, and he could see the stiff lines of tension in Karkat’s back as Karkat slumped further down in his chair and rested his chin on his crossed arms. It was weird—Karkat was really big, but he still looked all of thirteen years old then, unsure and so, so worried. His feet were kind of large and he looked kinda stretched thin in some places, like he didn’t fit his body yet. John wondered if aliens got those achy growing pains in their knees too.

It was always funny to be reminded of that difference. It was mostly little things that threw John off, like handing his crosbytop to Karkat and having to keep himself from giggling as Karkat tried to type on the tiny keys with as much emphatic rage as possible. (Thanks to the wonders of alchemizing, they eventually got human-sized chairs and troll-sized chairs, mostly because Dave said he was sick of having to use old flarping manuals as booster seats.)

Time passed weirdly in the Veil. The countdown had stopped, just plain frozen at the time they had entered it, and it felt like all of paradox space was holding its breath. The days blurred together, worn down by the unchanging black of the void like a t-shirt faded in the wash. Except it never really got comfortably worn-in, not really, the endless echoing corridors too big for trolls, never mind humans.

John found himself staying up late, lingering in the lab as Jade and Sollux typed away and Karkat made valiant efforts at creatively swearing paradox space into submission. He’d like to say that he used his friendleaderly authority to occasionally get Karkat away from the computers to get some sleep, but he usually ended up using the windy thing to gust him away and sitting on Karkat until he agreed (after a lot of hissing and spitting) to nap in a pile somewhere for an hour, just an hour, Egbert, do you understand? The lab always seemed a lot emptier while Karkat was napping, long limbs all curled up into a ball.

They were so close to figuring it out, to making their own world, somewhere human-sized and troll-sized and all theirs.

—

In any case, things happened—“shenanigans,” as Dave put it—and it all turned out pretty okay.

Their new world is very green and very empty, some weird amalgam of Alternia and Earth that is both strangely familiar and completely foreign.

John can tell when the world has taken something from Alternia, because it’s like they’ve suddenly wandered into Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or something. Everything is a little too big, a bit beyond the normal scale. Trees like buildings, bigger than the redwoods John had seen one summer with Dad. Grass taller than him and sharp, too, because everything Alternian seems to be kind of pointy. Giant spiny bushes that you could get lost in for ages, and make gardening chainsaws seem downright sensible. And there are ferns. So many ferns.

The animals they find are pretty cool: crazy prehistoric mammals that John recognizes from natural history textbooks, familiar-looking but different, and most of them way bigger than he would have expected. (Just the other day, he saw this eight-foot long beaver thing!) Occasionally, in the distance, he sees even larger beasts: graceful, hulking creatures all in white. Karkat frowns hard at those when they appear, squinting at them through binoculars, like he’s looking for something.

Who knows exactly how the whole thing worked out—Rose postulated that they’re way before the hypothetical era of whatever human-troll-hybrid civilization might arise, so with all the crazy alchemized stuff they brought with them, they’re like the strangest cavemen ever. Aradia says that she wonders what future archaeologists will think upon finding the remains of a Snoop Dogg thermal hull, to which Rose says that it would most likely become ensconced in legend as a sacred relic of the dwarves and giants of old.

At first, it's like some super-cool camping trip (with aliens! on a crazy planet!) and they’re all so relieved to be here that it takes awhile to realize that this is where they're stuck for the rest of their lives. Karkat eventually wrestles them all into a "IF I HAVE TO SLEEP IN A TENT ONE MORE NIGHT I WILL SINGLE-HANDEDLY DISTILL MY HATE TOWARDS TENTS INTO LOVINGLY SHITTED BRICKS THAT I WILL SOMEDAY BUILD INTO AN ARCHITECTURAL MASTERPIECE OF RAGE, SO LET’S BUILD SOME KIND OF FUCKING HIVE" group meeting that eventually devolves into a battle as to whether tree houses or hobbit burrows are the best, but it does get the ball rolling.

All in all, it’s warm and there aren't too many things that want to kill them, so it’s all right! Sometimes, though, it does feel really empty. Even if John's neighbourhood was pretty quiet, it's nothing like the quiet they find here. It's like the whole world got muffled, and everyone is being a little louder and a little more obnoxious to fill up the space.

But it's theirs, weirdo prehistoric giant sloths and all.

(He’s totally going to ride one of those things like a mechanical bull.)

(Karkat can help.)

(Yes.)

(Hell yes.)

—

It takes them a little while to figure out a calendar for their planet, but they figure that the reappearance of hotter weather means that they’re okay to celebrate hooray-one-planetary-rotation-around-the-sun-day. (They’ve been meaning to name something catchier for a long time, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet. Karkat and Jade are still arguing whether “yeep” would be an appropriate combination of “year” and “sweep.” Jade says it sounds super-cute, but Karkat says it sounds like someone treading on a whisker-beast.) This time, Rose unearths magnetic wodka from the depths of her syllabus, making most of her tree plummet to the ground, and they end up mixing ill-advised cocktails named “Fatal Attraction” and “fuckin cocktails how do they work.”

Many empty glasses later, John finds himself lying on top of Karkat, sticking colourful magnet letters (also from Rose’s sylladex) to Karkat’s belly. Karkat had lost his shirt at some point during the party, and John suspected it was currently being used by Terezi as a dragon plushie cape. Which was totally okay, because it made it way easier to make the magnets stay put. He’s trying to spell out “karkat is pretty cool!” but he’s missing a bunch of letters, so it ends up looking a lot more like “karx4t is c∞l.” He straightens out the sideways eight. It looks like magnetic wodka even gets to giant trolls, because Karkat isn’t even complaining that much, just quietly grumbling. He can’t mind all that much, because he could totally just pick John off and pitch him aside. John kind of wants to make Karkat stand up to see if the letters will stay on, but he’s pretty comfy right here.

John wakes up much later with the imprint of magnet letters on his cheek and Karkat’s big hand petting his hair. He can feel the muscle of Karkat’s belly shifting under him, and he wonders when it was that Katkat started filling out and growing into his limbs. He guesses they’ve all been growing a bit, really. Things are still nice and fuzzy right now, and he can tell that things probably aren’t going to be that nice and fuzzy later, so he just goes back to sleep.

—

The FRUITY ASSHOLE RUMPUS HIVEMANSION finally gets completed a little while after—for certain definitions of completed, since Jade would still be fiddling around to see if she could make it more efficient for long after, magically-alchemized-endless-power-source or no. She and Sollux are constantly finding new ways to adapt the technology they brought with them, resulting in ever-weirder combinations of motherboards and silicomb stacks—even now, it's not unusual to find them fiddling around late at night. (Sometimes in their underwear, to cut down on the static, they said, but John is pretty sure silicomb doesn't much care about static. Karkat says he doesn't want to fucking know.)

They’d gone with Terezi’s suggestion, in the end—a bizarre treehouse kind of thing, sprawling across the branches of an Alternian tree. It's airy and full of light, and completely defies any kind of organization. John likes it a lot.

John stands outside the hivemansion, trying to figure out if any parts are going to spontaneously drop off, but nope, it all looks pretty solid. It’s done. For a moment, there’s a curl in his gut of something like panic, of “okay, now what.”

John sometimes wonders if the planet seems smaller to the trolls, since they’re bigger, or if they also have that sense of fear and excitement that comes with knowing that there’s a wide world out there. There’s a sense of space and sheer unknowable possibility that hangs thick in the air and makes him feel anchorless, sometimes.

He sees Karkat in the distance, head tilted back towards the coming darkness and the moons rising, and his heart does this weird, terrible flippy thing. So he goes up and tucks himself into Karkat's side, slinging his arm around Karkat’s waist because it's the most comfortable place for it. Karkat squawks a bit but submits to friendleaderly hugs. John gives great hugs—Jade says so, and she's no slouch at hugging herself. It helps that Karkat is nice to hug, big and solid and grounded.

He’s not sure why he kisses Karkat, but he misses the first time by a whole lot, his lips skimming off Karkat’s collarbone. Karkat is just too darn tall sometimes.

Karkat looks down at him with this hilariously bewildered look on his face. “What the merry fuck was that? If you’re trying to gnaw your way into my thoracic organ-protecting structure with your stupid blunt human teeth, it’s going to take a long fucking time, so tell me if I need to get a book.”

John rolls his eyes and tugs firmly on Karkat’s shirt to get him to bend towards him. (“Quit stretching my shirt, you— wait— what—”). He’s bang on target that time, a kiss bullseye worth all kinds of awesome points.

John has to stand on the tips of his toes to reach, and Karkat has to bend way down. Sometimes, John misses the windy thing something fierce. He wishes he could just float up a couple of feet. It's hard to stare meaningfully into someone's eyes when their sightline is a few feet above yours! Not that he's complaining. Kissing Karkat is pretty awesome, even if Karkat is grumbling about getting a crick in his back.

Karkat picks him up, obviously frustrated with having to bend down. John laughs, and his legs wrap around Karkat's narrow hips. John kisses and kisses him, his hands cupped around Karkat’s face, pressed against Karkat's chest, and man, it's so, so good.

And then Terezi pokes her head over Karkat’s shoulder and makes them both jump and Karkat kind of overbalances and makes them both fall down in a pile of limbs. The whole thing makes his prankster’s gambit plummet down into the negatives, but he can’t bring himself to mind too much.

—

The cold season comes, and it’s even quieter than usual. The animals are hidden away for the time being, and the big white ones that do wander out are indistinguishable from the snow, leaving heavy tracks behind them that weave through the trees. The branches around the hivemansion are hung heavy with snow, and it’s like being in a big cocoon, the outside world muted and white.

They’re well-stocked, so there’s no real need for John to go out, but they all get a little stir-crazy sometimes. Besides, John likes the snow. Karkat sometimes comes after him, yelling at him for going out alone— “How the hell have you survived this long, don’t you know there are fangbeasts out there,”— and part of John is frustrated that Karkat doesn't think he can take care of himself. (He's got more than enough man-grit—John once had to defend himself from a fangbeast-sabertooth-thing, and it was fine. It's too much like the game, though, and he doesn't like doing it very much.) Maybe it’s just because they didn't have snow back on Alternia or something.

Karkat’s gotten more used to it, though, and John and Jade drag him out to the nearby lake nearby to slip and slide over the ice. He tricks Karkat into bending down so that he can stuff snow down his jacket, which is great, because Karkat yells a lot and tackles him into a snowdrift. John is stupidly fascinated by the way that the cold makes Karkat's cheeks flush, the tips of his ears bright red because he's dumb and forgot the hat that Rose made him.

The best part, though, is coming back up to the hivemansion. It's their lifeboat, all afloat in white, the inside warm and cozy after the snow. John likes stealing Karkat’s sweaters when he’s sitting in front of the heater. They’re big even on Karkat, so they’re huge on him, like a “fucking troll snuggie,” as Dave says.

Karkat's recuperacoon is still really weird, but if John ignore the green slime part, it's like a hot bath at the end of the day, especially with Karkat's warm body behind him. He can feel Karkat awake at night sometimes, even though they've mostly adapted to some odd half-diurnal schedule. His eyes glow in the dark like a nightlight. This time, he takes Karkat into his bed and they snuggle into the covers. Karkat has to curl up a bit, because otherwise his feet stick off the end of the bed, but it makes it that much better.

It doesn't take long for Karkat to start ranting about John's cold feet ("What the fuck, your toes are like roe cubes straight from the thermal hull.”) and John has to kiss him because he'll keep on going, otherwise. It doesn’t take long before there are way too many clothes involved, so John tugs Karkat’s sweater off and wriggles out of his pants and it's pretty much the best naked blanket fort ever.

John takes a deep breath and grabs for Karkat's hands, which clasp around his fingers, always so big. He really, really likes Karkat's hands.

It takes forever for him to convince Karkat that he really wants this, because Karkat can be dumb sometimes. But eventually, Karkat opens him up around his fingers, slow and careful, frowning worriedly at him all the while. Karkat had said that he wanted to do it himself, not just watch John, which was a-okay by John. They'd had to borrow Kanaya's manicure kit (and whoa, troll manicure kits are pretty hardcore). Clipping Karkat's sharp nails should have been gross or something, because clipping fingernails and toenails is never sexy, especially when you forget one on the floor and step on it later. Sitting in Karkat's lap and carefully trimming his nails, though, John had felt something warm and ridiculously fond settle inside his belly. Rose had said something about cutting Sampson's hair. Karkat had apparently picked up some former-earth references, and he flipped Rose off with the pointy-clawed hand John wasn’t holding.

When he’s ready, he bears down on Karkat’s dick-bulge-thing, and it's almost too much in every single way. It aches in a good way, though, and John keeps going. His legs are shaking a bit underneath him, and he feels Karkat's hands frantically petting at this thighs. He's babbling, saying, "Fuck, John, fuck, why did you think this was a good idea, this is the worst idea anyone's ever had, brain-damaged chimpanzees would have rejected this idea for being too fucking stupid, oh my god, fuck, you're so tight, I can't—"

John lets a laugh bubble out of his chest, all breath. "Stop talking about monkeys, you're ridiculous. That is, like, the least sexy thing ever."

"It's what you are, you stupid nooksniffing moron, tiny fucking beautiful pink monkeys—god, you're so small, how is this even going to work—"

John stops, taking a deep breath—the head of Karkat's cock is thick and insistent inside him, and Karkat's all tense and worried, but he needs to relax, because this is going to be good, he can tell. It's a weird feeling right now, but there’s that edge of something really great, some deeply satisfying ache.

He grasps Karkat's hands, kisses the tips of his fingers, and guides them to settle around his hips. Karkat’s long fingers splay across his back tentatively, and John sometimes just wants to shake him and say that he’s not delicate, that he won’t break that easily.

“Okay, okay, keep going, oh—” John can hear himself saying.

He just feels so full, filled up to the brim and overwhelmed. It's too much and it's exactly enough. He can't stop gasping, like there isn't enough air in the room. It's fucking amazing, and it's even better to open his eyes and to see Karkat laid out before him, all flushed and really, really pretty. Okay, it might be kind of weird to call a giant alien troll "pretty," but Karkat is totally gorgeous right now: the dark sweep of his eyelashes, the long length of his chest, his tousled hair spilling over the pillow. He's trying so hard to stay still and to not thrust up, his teeth digging into his lower lip and a line between his eyebrows.

John leans down, and oh whoa, Karkat’s bulge shifts inside him, pressing into new, interesting places that leave him gasping against Karkat’s lips for a few seconds. “Hey dude, just go for it, it’s really really okay, okay?” he babbles, kissing Karkat in between his words.

Karkat groans and rolls his hips up into John not nearly hard enough, so John sits back up and braces his hand on Karkat’s chest and just goes for it. If John leans back, he can trace a finger around where he’s stretched around Karkat, the hot velvety firmness of Karkat’s bulge, and just a little further back, the slick lips of Karkat’s nook. He’s wet enough that John can just tuck two of his fingers in his nook, and Karkat jerks up and shudders all over. John's skin feels taut, tight as a drum, like there’s so much inside him that it’s hard to keep it in.

When Karkat’s arms go around his back, it feels like there’s nothing but karkatkarkatkarkat all around and in him, big and tough and lovely, and John just wants to keep him forever, to make something new with him.

—

The cold season melts and the ferns come again, fiddleheads poking through the earth, and Karkat looks at John and asks if he’s happy. Not in so many words, sure—when Karkat says it, it sounds a lot more like, “Okay, someone as inconceivably under-gifted in the brain-pan-matter as you could be fucking content as a sea-dwelling bivalve anywhere, and that human expression is really fucking stupid, why would bivalves be especially happy? Is it something in the water that fries their little clam brains, or what. But if you hypothetically had enough skull stuffing to surpass marine life with nothing to do but play with their snorkel-bulges— "

John gets it, though, because translating from Karkat-ese is really not hard at all. He starts to laugh it off and say that clams have just as much right to be happy as anyone else, Karkat, maybe they have happy little clammy lives clamming around. He looks over at Karkat, though, and he has his serious leaderly face on, the one that says that he cares way too much about everybody and everything, even stupid clams. So he doesn't say that.

The wind through the crazy-big trees is warm and smells of the sea— they'll have to explore further, because they've only found the lakes so far. John leans into it a bit and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he's still trying to find a way to say that he's sad that they've lost so many things, dumb things and important things, like Nicholas Cage and poptarts and fake mustaches and Dad and Vriska and all sorts of other stuff. But as beginnings go, this isn't bad. There's Rose and Jade and Dave and everyone else. There are huge trees and two moons in the sky. There's Karkat.

Karkat is still looking at him really hard, like he's bracing himself for a blow. So John scoots in closer and settles himself in Karkat's lap, moving Karkat's arms so that they drape over his shoulders, like he's got a big Karkat cape.

"The sunset's really nice, huh? Sunsets back home— well, back on Earth, haha— didn't get all those colours. Hey, could you see sunsets on Alternia, or were they still too crazy-bright?" he says at last, and Karkat must be okay at translating from John-speak, because he snorts and bends down to rest his chin on John’s head, and he doesn't even say that sunsets are the most cliched fucking thing.

The sun silhouettes the giant albino sloths lumbering in the distance, Karkat complains about the new changes to the hivemansion, and things are pretty darn okay.


End file.
